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Airport security as political theatre

By Lauchlan T. Munro

Wed., Jan. 22, 2014

The recent pipe bomb incident at Edmonton airport has exposed our airport security for the piece of political theatre that it is. Airport security is only marginally about keeping us safe. It is mostly about maintaining the perception of manageability and control and reminding people of how the government protects us in a dangerous world. It is more important to be seen to be managing security than to do it well.

Let us recall the highlights of the incident: a series of screening agents at Edmonton airport failed to recognize a pipe bomb. One agent tried to return the bomb to its owner, who was allowed to board the plane despite refusing to take his own bomb back. The bomb was kept for several days in the security check area, in a bin with seized nail scissors and tubes of toothpaste. The bomb was initially tested for narcotics, but not explosives. The three metres of electrical wire emerging from the pipe bomb aroused no suspicion for days.

There's a great deal of emphasis on security at airports now, but a pipe bomb incident at Edmonton airport shows that security is only marginally about keeping air travellers safe. (Steven Senne / Associated Press file photo)

Such incompetence rightly attracted shock and outrage. But other aspects of the story deserve more attention than they got. Even if they had recognized the bomb, the screening agents could not have detained a passenger attempting to board an aircraft with a bomb. They would have had to call the RCMP to do that. And there was no RCMP officer at the screening area at the time of the incident.

More importantly, the Edmonton airport security screening personnel were not government employees, but employees of a private company hired by the Canadian Air Transport Security Authority. Since when did hiring the lowest bidder sound like a good way to ensure people’s security?

Another problematic policy is the random selection of passengers for special screening, a practice with almost zero chance of picking out a hijacker. Why? Hijackers are statistically rare events. Randomly selecting a small number of cases in the hope that one of them will be the rare event you are looking for is a fool’s game.

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Since random selection won’t find the hijackers, why do we do it? Deterrence is the usual answer; would-be hijackers know they may be caught and so they don’t try. While that logic worked in the era when all the hijackers wanted was to go to Cuba, it makes no sense in an era when the hijackers are willing to die in the hijacking.

We could use more intelligent sampling strategies. The man convicted of trying to blow up the Northwest Airlines flight to Detroit in 2009 was not selected for special screening. Yet security screeners missed six markers — not alone but in combination — that should have triggered special screening. He was a young man, travelling alone with no checked baggage on a one-way ticket between two countries, and yet he was not a citizen or resident of either country. Each of those markers individually was innocuous. But the combination of all six factors (male, young, travelling alone, one-way ticket, no connection to the countries he was travelling between, no checked baggage) should have triggered special screening.

Worse still, security measures are frequently botched. I once witnessed a woman in her 60s being “specially selected.” Well before she reached the security screening, an airport employee told her that the letters SS, printed in bold on her boarding card, meant “special selection.” If the woman had been a hijacker, she would have had ample opportunity to change her plan.

So, what is all this airport security for? It is so badly done that it is hard to imagine passenger security is the main motivation. Israeli security officials (and they have not lost an aircraft to hijacking for more than 40 years) do not even attempt to hide their derision regarding airport security in North America and Europe. The changes that would really increase security would not cost much: not contracting out security to the lowest bidder would be a good place to start. Teaching security screeners what bombs look like would be another.

The fact that such simple, low-cost measures are not put in place tells us that airport security, while ensuring a minimum level of security, has another, more important and deeply political function. It is political theatre. It makes the authorities look good, while reminding us of the dangers of life out there and justifying the intrusions into our privacy.

Lauchlan T. Munro is director of the School of International Development and Global Studies at the University of Ottawa. He used to manage security for all UN agencies in a war zone.

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